Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Wouldn't it be great if somehow we could combine the Rolling Stone and People's lists into one uber-list?

Loose no more sleep pining! With the magic of Excel I have done just that.

I gave each album on each list a score out of 100. This was just 101 minus the rank - so the top album has a score of 100 while the lowest album has a score of 1. Then I added the scores on the two lists together. So if an album appeared on both lists its total score was the sum of the separate scores. For albums appearing on only one list, the total score was just the score from that list. Then I ranked the albums by total score and took the top 100.

Opeth and Porcupine Tree each appear 3 times. Aggaloch, Animal Collective, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Isis, Mastodon, Moonsorrow, Neurosis, Pain of Salvation, The National and Tom Waits each appear twice. So this is a heavier, more progressive, less mainstream list.

Last post I looked at the artists with the most entries in the top 100. This time I'll look at the top 10 albums, starting with Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone - Top 10 Albums of the 2000s

1

. Radiohead

Kid A

2.

The Strokes

Is This It

3.

Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

4.

Jay-Z

The Blueprint

5.

The White Stripes

Elephant

6.

Arcade Fire

Funeral

7.

Eminem

The Marshall Mathers LP

8.

Bob Dylan

Modern Times

9.

M.I.A.

Kala

10.

Kanye West

The College Dropout

Not a bad list - a little bit of something for most people - except metal of any type. The Strokes don't really float my boat - but that must be just me because Is This It got rave reviews. There is not much that's actually objectionable here - but the best 10 albums of the decade? Let's see if the people capture the zeitgeist any better.

RYM - Top 10 Albums of the 2000s

1

.

Radiohead

Kid A

2

.

Arcade Fire

Funeral

3

.

Godspeed You Black Emperor!

Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!

4

.

Radiohead

In Rainbows

5

.

Opeth

Blackwater Park

6

.

Madvillain

Madvillainy

7

.

Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

8

.

Tool

Lateralus

9

.

Radiohead

Amnesiac

10

.

Sufjan Stevens

Illinois

The people really love Radiohead! I don't have a problem with that - give genius its due, I say. GYBE, Opeth, Tool, Sufjan Stevens are all strong claims - IMHO more so than the albums included in the Rolling Stone list. I confess to not being across Madvillainy. I love it when this kind of analysis throws up things I've previously missed.

Overall, leaving Radiohead aside, the Rolling Stone list seems far more mainstream. The RYM list far edgier and with Opeth and Tool much heavier. If I had to choose one for a sojourn on a desert island I'd take the RYM list.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Here we look at all the artists that had more than 1 entry on either chart. I have perhaps been sloppy in conflating number of entries with popularity. Theoretically an artist could have had a single mega album that was more popular than all the others.

Here are the most popular Rolling Stone artists. The number of entries on the chart is shown in parentheses:

Radiohead, Coldplay and U2 come as no surprise at the top of the list. But Kanye and Kings of Leon were a bit surprising. Otherwise this is a very white and very rock oriented list.

Here is the RYM list:

1. Radiohead (4)

2. = Opeth (3)

2. = Porcupine Tree (3)

4. = Agalloch (2)

4. = Animal Collective (2)

4. = Arcade Fire (2)

4. = Johnny Cash (2)

4. = Mastodon (2)

4. = Moonsorrow (2)

4. = Neurosis (2)

4. = Pain of Salvation (2)

4. = Queens of the Stone Age (2)

4. = The National (2)

4. = Tom Waits (2)

Whoa! What happened? Even whiter, rockier and heavier. Radiohead still rules, but Kanye, Coldplay, Kings of Leon and U2 are out. Kanye does score 1 entry in the RYM 100 - but Coldplay, U2 and Kings of Leon don't chart at all. Its tempting to say RYM is a much younger demographic - but then Johnny Cash and Tom Waits represent the old hands. Rolling Stone is certainly much more mainstream.

Interestingly, when I looked at the 500 best albums of all time - the RYM chart was blacker and jazzier.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

In July 2012 I started publishing a series of stories comparing Rolling Stone magazine's list of the best 500 albums of all time with the top 500 albums on Rate Your Music (RYM). RYM is my favourite music discovery tool. It is a dedicated, crows sourced rating site.

I just discovered Rolling Stone's list of the best albums of the 2000s. I thought it would be interesting to repeat the analysis for this recent decade.

You can find the Rolling Stone list here. I generated the RYM list on 6 July 2014. For the record, here it is: